How to Record Your Desktop Video and Audio Using “Avconv” Tool in Ubuntu

Libav is a set of cross-platform libraries and tools that are used to deal with multimedia files, streams and protocols, it was originally forked from the ffmpeg project. Libav includes many sub-tools like:

Avplay: a video & audio player.

Avconv: a multimedia converter plus a video & audio recorder from different sources.

Avprobe: a tool that connects to the multimedia file stream and returns many useful information and statistics about it.

Libavfilter: a filtering API for different Libav tools.

In this article, we’ll explain how to record the Linux desktop’s video & audio using the ‘Avconv’ program on Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint distributions.

Step 1: Installing Avconv Tool

1.avconv is a part from the “libav-tools” package, which is available to install from the official repositories for all Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu and Mint, using following commands.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install libav-tools

Install Avconv Tool

Note: Installing packages from default repositories, might give you a little older version of ‘avconv‘ tool. Thus, we recommend you to get the latest version from the official git repository, as shown below.

Note: You will have to run “./configure –help” in order to list all the available options for the configuration file and install codecs and libraries that you want, you will also need to do a lot of work in order to install the dependencies.

Also note, if you’re used the compile-from-source way, you’ll always have to use “sudo avconv” instead of “avconv” to run the tool.

Step 2: Start Video Recording of Desktop

2. You’re ready now, all what you have to do is to record your desktop video by issuing following command.

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17 Responses

Thanks for taking the time for making this tutorial, really appreciated. I always create screencast with a web-based software calls Acethinker Online Screen Recorder, It is an online tool that lets you record your screen right from the browser. Share it here as an alternative method.

Q1. I am playing a game. The game has a very interesting sound theme. If I record my desktop, I can’t capture that sound theme right now. Is there any options to grab the sounds that come from the system.

Q2. With this command, is it possible to record in tty (text terminals)?

You can also try ScreenStudio as a gui for avconv. It allows you to record your desktop and add other things like a logo and a small blurb as a title for your screencast, and also capture the picture from your webcam.

it can also allow you to stream what you get to either Youtube live and a few other sites.

yeah, besides, other ubuntu screen recorder like Krut Computer Recorder also works fine for making screencast. And it even allows for moving recording region while recording. More ubuntu screen recorder can be found here, you can check it out here and take your pick.http://www.apowersoft.com/ubuntu-screen-recorder.html